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Tuesday, June 19, 2018

Cameroon Separatist Clashes Shut Down Schools

FILE - A woman stands outside
the damaged roof of a school's dormitory, after it was set on fire, in
Bafut, in the northwest English-speaking region of Cameroon, Nov. 15,
2017.

By Moki Kindzeka

YAOUNDE, CAMEROON — It is a bright Tuesday morning, with children hawking goods to
drivers and passersby on the congested streets of Yaounde. The number of
these sidewalk sellers is increasing with the ongoing conflict in
Cameroon's English-speaking northwest and southwest regions, where
fighting between armed separatists and government troops has shut down
schools and sent thousands of children fleeing to safer ground.

Among the sidewalk peddlers is 16-year-old Delphine Tabe. She says
she has been a hawker for more than a year since she fled from her
village in Lebialem, an administrative unit in the southwest.

"I am selling boiled groundnuts to have money and help my mother who
is in the hospital. She was beaten by Cameroon gendarmes after a
military man was killed in our village. My mother almost died. Our
school was burned and students were beaten. Since that day in May 2017,
we escaped to Yaounde and we do not have money to go to school."

Delphine says her chances of pursuing her dream - becoming a teacher -
are gradually slipping away as she has no one to sponsor her education.
Instead, she has to look for money to help her sick mother.

In the kitchen at the house where Delphine lives in Yaounde, food is
being prepared for 32 people. Emmanuel Nembo, a 52-year old government
worker originally from Lebialem, says that a year ago, he had only five
mouths to feed.

The number exploded as people from the southwest fled their villages and pleaded for him to feed and shelter them.

Emmanuel says he is praying for the crisis to stop because many have been coming and he can no longer offer help.

"We are stretching an olive hand of peace. Those in the bush should
give a chance. Come back home, to their homes so that they could meet
their mothers, brothers and sisters," he says.

Many schools have been closed in the northwest and southwest areas
since November 2016, when lawyers and teachers began a strike to stop
what they see as the overbearing use of French.

Separatists took over the movement, and began pushing for the regions to become independent.

Since then, several dozen schools have been torched, and armed men
have kidnapped or killed a number of teachers. Many students in the
regions can no longer attend the few schools that are still open, for
fear of the unknown.

The United Nations estimates that more than 100,000 people, a
majority of them children of school age, have fled the violence in the
English-speaking regions for safer locations. Tens of thousands have
crossed over to Nigeria, and no one knows when any of them will ever
return to school.